November 16, 2105--ISIS in Paris

I may have a different perspective after I, perhaps, cool down.

God knows there have been much worse cases of barbarism, evil during my lifetime. Even quite recently. By the numbers, ISIS's blowing the Russian plane out of the sky over the Sinai killed more innocent people than the seven or eight coordinated attacks in Paris.

Numerically, the terrorist bombings in Mumbai, Spain, Beirut, and of course on 9/11 killed and maimed more people, but there is something different about ISIS than al Qaeda. Something different for me about Paris than even New York.

That tells you how in a rage I am about what happened Friday night.

OK, I used the e-word. Evil.

All of these terrorist atrocities, including the pubic beheadings, are more than "cowardly acts." If there is such a thing as evil, this is it. Have there been worse examples? Of course. Including in France.

The French, among other "civilized" people, during the Second World War rounded up and shipped many thousands of their Jews to certain death in Nazi Germany.

A special definition of evil is necessary to categorize the various holocausts of the 20th century.

But what was perpetrated Friday still qualifies as dastardly. Unspeakable. All too human in its inhumanness.

Words fail.

French president Hollande says this was an act of "war." The Pope said we are in "World War III." Both may be right.

If we are, what then does that mean?

France is a linchpin of the NATO alliance. NATO's charter in effect says that "an attack on one is an attack on all." That includes us. The United States.

That charter was written well before al Qaeda and ISIS existed. It was for a time when there were credible threats of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. What does it mean now when the definition of war had shifted? Does it mean that the U.S. is also at war? That because France was "attacked," that it experienced more than an evil act of terrorism, we too have been attacked and thus are obligated to act accordingly? To join them in waging war?

I do not know how to think about this. What I do know is that this has struck me deeply. I have even been gathering information about going to France, Paris, this week. As an act of solidarity and defiance.

Rona thinks I'm crazy. She's right. I am.

Minimally I am trying to think about what France should do, more appropriately, as an American citizen what we should do because I do think we are at war.

Yes, I know how we got there. Not solely as the result of President Obama's weak leadership--though he has been weak and that hasn't helped, feeling that the "Arab Spring" would help bring about versions of democracy to the region. This just as naive in its own way as George W. Bush's delusion that toppling Saddam Hussein would do that for Iraq and surrounding dictatorships.

What matters now is what to do going forward.

Drone-guided bombings will not get the job done. Depending on lightly-armed Kurd forces on the ground will not defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Russia's involvement, even if it shifts to confront ISIS rather than Syrian rebels, will not get the job done.

Nothing this simple, this limited will work.

I can hardly believe I am thinking this, but only a massive, boots-on-the-ground force of American troops has any chance of succeeding. Perhaps 100,000 are required. Maybe more.

This would mean many casualties, even the beheading of captured U.S. soldiers. But does anyone have a better, more realistic idea?

I hate this. Hate all of it. But I am feeling radicalized.

ISIS has to be shown to be a failure in order to stem the flow of young lunatics to its "cause." Disaffiliated youth from the Islamic world as well as from Europe and the United States are partly drawn to ISIS because it is perceived to be winning. This encourages those with distorted minds to believe that the apocalypse they seek is near at hand. Defeat ISIS, devastate it, and that belief system will crumble.

I am sorry. I wish I could believe in the effectiveness of diplomacy and financial warfare, including bombing the oil fields and petroleum distribution system in ISIS-controlled territory.

I don't.

As long as they feel they are winning, ISIS fighters can live on fumes. They are that motivated and tenacious.

So they have to be killed. All of them would be ideal. As many as possible is imperative.

Again, I can't believe these worlds are coming from me. I have up to now considered myself to be moderate, essentially pacifistic. Not any more.

Paris on Friday changed that.

When will we too again feel the pain and fear?

August 25, 2015--Intimacy of Evil

In her remarkable book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt writes about the "banality of evil." How Adolf Eichmann, though he was responsible for the transport system that herded millions of Jews to concentration camps and their ultimate slaughter, was not in the ordinary sense actively and directly evil, but was a bureaucrat who, in a perverse sense, was carrying out orders as expeditiously and efficiently as possible.

For discussing Eichmann in this way--as a banal functionary and not a passionate anti-semite or a fanatical ideologue--Arendt was widely criticized as not holding him sufficiently responsible for his deeds--that he was, she was interpreted as saying, just doing his job. That his actions were "ordinary."

Quite the contrary--she saw his version of evil in a particularly horrific way--how it was manifested in a very average man which left the suggestion that there is a thin human line between "normality" and there ability to commit unspeakable evil. That someone so ordinary, so inconspicuous could participate so dispassionately in one of history's most heinous collective crimes.

I thought--how different is the evil being perpetrated today by ISIS.

We have been sad and outraged witnesses to their public beheadings and other barbaric crimes against innocent people in the lands they have overrun and subjugated to their merciless rule.

Just last week, in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, ISIS warriors slaughtered the keeper of its more-than-2000-year-old archeological treasures. Treasures considered so noteworthy and historically significant as to be listed a UNESCO World Heritage site.

To ISIS, since the temples and magnificent artifacts predate the advent of Islam, were built before the prophet Mohammed was born, they are the work of infidels and need to be brutally eliminated as do any people who do not embrace or follow ISIS's version of Islam.

Making an emphatic point of this, they hauled 83-year-old Khalid al-Asaad, the keeper of the antiquities for more than 50 years, into the town square and, after ordering all citizens to come forth as witnesses, according to the report in the New York Times, "cut off his head in front of the crowd" and then "his blood-soaked body was suspended with red twine by his wrists from a traffic light, his head resting on the ground between his feet, his glasses still on."

This is not the banality of evil.

This is not the impersonal imposition of slaughter.

This is not evil propagated from a bureaucrat's office or delivered from 30,000 feet.

This is not using current technology to force victims into "showers" and once there dispense with them by the administration of the latest in poison gases and then with bulldozers pushing the mounds of bodies into open trenches where the machines bury the dead and the evidence.

This is not evil where no one is touched. Where everything is by schedule and assisted by state-of-the-art technology.

ISIS's is the intimacy of evil. Not its banality.

These evil-doers hold victims in their arms. With their own hands they hold up victims' heads. And then, in that ugly embrace, cut off their heads. And then place them carefully on the ground, making sure eyeglasses are carefully arranged.

A friend here who is essentially a pacifist wants "to nuke" them. Minimally place enough American "boots on the ground"--even 200,000 if necessary--to kill them all. Kill them all.

I get it.

March 10, 2015--Lincoln Brigade

Last weekend reading about how Mohammed Emwazi ("Jihad John") was drawn to ISIS and became its most infamous executioner and how three young men from Brooklyn were apparently headed in the same direction, I was reminded of other examples of young men being drawn to ideological struggles, signing up for them because they believed in what they were seeking to accomplish, often by bloody means.

I want to be careful here. What ISIS is perpetrating is as evil as anything we have seen in a century. And so I do not want even to imply a false equivalency. But when we struggle to figure out what about ISIS is so compelling to these gullible and pathetic young people, we might want to take a close look at what drew other young men from around the world to take sides in the Spanish Civil War, especially Americans who made their way there as part of the Lincoln Brigade.

Though many of liberal persuasion today see what the Brigade stood for to be admirable--it was militantly anti-fascist and, in the case of many Brigade members, pro-Soviet, socialist, and communist--still, like ISIS, it was a magnet for thousands of alienated, revolutionary youth of its era and, as much as some supported its agenda, at least as many saw these foreign volunteers as outsider interlopers who had no business meddling in what initially a local struggle.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 pitted Nationalist fascist forces under General Francisco Franco against the army of the duly elected socialist Republican or Loyalist government. The former were supported militarily by Nazi Germany, who field-tested modern forms of blitzkrieg and air warfare in Spain, including the indiscriminate bombing of civil populations, while the Republicans were directly aided by the Soviet Union. Thus, the war was seen to be a dress rehearsal for World War II.

The Nationalists won and Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist for 36 years.

It was in support of the Loyalists that the Lincoln Brigade was organized and attracted 2,800 fiercely committed Americans. 750 died in combat. At the time, those who left for Spain were roundly criticized as radicals who had no business fighting for a country other than the United States.

Attempts to understand the appeal of causes and movements of these kinds find that though ideologies may differ--even radically--there are psychological characteristics among recruits that are consistent across the spectrum. The best thinking suggests that groups that are most appealing offer disaffiliated recruits what they crave most--a sense of belonging and a place to act out their resentments.

This may sound like psychobabble, as is any attempt to summarize something as complex as the appeal of radical groups and cults, but to dismiss participation as a simple expression of evil is not helpful. Again, to join ISIS is far from the same as enlisting in the Lincoln Brigade, but there are useful lessons that might help offer alternative appeals to youth seeking affiliation and, failing that, suggest ways to fight the scourge that is the Islamic State.